Gender Bender Chemicals Also Make You Fat

We used to think that exposure to bisphenol A was a guy thing- the estrogen-like gender-bender chemical that leaches from polycarbonates and the lining of tin cans may cause male breast enlargement and dropping sperm counts, but hey, that's only half the population. Now we learn that it could be a chick thing too: experiments at the University of California at Irvine by Bruce Blumberg indicate that they make you fat. He looked at the fungicide Tributyltin.

"What we discovered," Blumberg said, is that tributyltin disrupted genetic interactions that regulate fat-cell activity in animals. "Exposure to tributyltin is increasing the number of fat cells, so the individual will get fatter faster as these cells produce more of the hormones that say 'feed me,'" Blumberg said. The exposed animals, he added, remain predisposed to obesity for life.

Others suspect the same thing happens with Bisphenol A. Frederick vom Saal of the University of Missouri's research indicates that developmental exposure to low doses of bisphenol A activates genetic mechanisms that promote fat-cell activity. "These in-utero effects are lifetime effects, and they occur at phenomenally small levels" of exposure.

We used to think that exposure to bisphenol A was a guy thing- the estrogen-like gender-bender chemical that leaches from polycarbonates and the lining of tin cans may cause male breast enlargement and dropping sperm counts, but hey, that's only half the